"The movie, by sheer speeding up the
mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections
into the world of creative configuration and structure. The message
of the movie medium is that of transition from linear connections
to configurations."
Marshall McLuhan[1]

The aesthetic history of media can be described on the basis of
a drift towards greater realism for improved immersion of the
viewer: with images becoming more detailed and spatial due to the
introduction of perspective, with photography as means of
mechanically reproducing specific views, with pictures that began
to move, later even to talk and take on natural color. On the other
hand, there have been setbacks too: for some reason, neither 3-D
movies nor Smell-O-Vision really worked. But what about the one-way
relationship between media and audience as the crucial obstacle for
realistic media? Even a high-resolution Imax movie will not give
the viewer feedback the way "real reality" does so
easily. So wasn't it time that media began to show some
interactivity in order to become a serious surrogate for
reality?

The idea of interactive media has not only to do with the demand
for realistic representation but also with the fear of being
controlled by media (which people would then call propaganda). In
certain early theories of cinema, the main concern was to tell a
story effectively and according to the inner rules of the medium.
Efficiency in this case meant first of all to restrain the
reactions of the viewer. After World War II and the experience of
fascism, this idea became unpopular. One of the first theorists to
develop a humanist approach to cinema was André Bazin. As a means
of counteracting manipulation through editing, Bazin favored the
deep-focus photography he found in the work of Orson Welles and
others. Instead of combining a series of different views, Welles
showed a whole room in which the viewer could decide what he wanted
to concentrate on, with the movie thereby being completed in the
head of the individual viewer. Though this structure wasn't
unusual in painting, theater or literature, for the film medium
this kind of "open artwork" can be regarded as a first
step towards audience engagement.

1
The structure of a traditional movie looks like a plain line with a
certain amount of little dots representing plot points. Plot points
are important events that change the narrative situation. The
popular notion of what an interactive movie should be is about
making these points nodes, so that the straight line turns into a
tree with forking paths. The important decisions in a story are no
longer made by its hero but by the viewer himself. That means a
movie would be interrupted from time to time for the viewers to
choose among two or more possibilities of how the story goes on.
The traditional model of viewer identification with a central
character turns into a unity of viewer and hero: we can call it the
kiss-it-or-shoot-it-model. A first version of this idea was the
"Kino-Automat" shown at the Expo 1967 in Montreal: Radusz
Cincera's One Man and his World was stopped several times
to give the audience the possibility to decide how the film should
continue. [2]

Already for economic reasons, this model seems rather
unsuitable, since it not only increases the amount of final footage
required, but also limits distribution to specially equipped
cinemas. Considering the growing number of Imax cinemas, it is
surprising that the Kino-Automat remained a curiosity in cinema
history. One reason might be that the apparently motionless cinema
audience is actually quite active. The resolution of a 35mm film,
compared with that of television or video, can occupy a much bigger
part of the viewer's visual field without revealing its
material. In the cinema, the viewer's eyes are constantly
moving in order to grasp the entire screen, whereas the monitor
fixes the view and finally sends the brain to sleep.[3] In order to avoid that problem, TV
and computer programs require us to constantly act - be it to zap,
phone, write, fire or go shopping.

2
The monitor appears to be the perfect media for direct viewer-user
feedback, and the computer game may be regarded as one of its most
demanding programs. Economically, the game outdoes interactive
prerecorded film footage because it uses audiovisual elements with
an extremely flexible structure that can even, in the case of 3-D
data, be viewed from all sides. But games can hardly be seen as
narrative, although some are placed inside a narrative frame in
order to emotionalize the action. A number of oppositions exist
between the forms of narration and game. Stories first of all
evolve out of protagonists who act according to their specific
characters. But a protagonist who is solely dependent on the
player's will cannot have a soul, even if the game design tries
to display one. A figure like Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider series first obtains identity
outside the game - via marketing, fan sites and performances in
other media. Due to its high level of abstraction, the game no
longer needs the human or humanoid characters essential to any kind
of story. Besides, narration works due to the different speed of
what the structuralists called fabula (the narrated content) and
syuzhet (the narration itself). The entire life of a person can be
told on four hundred pages, two hours or ten minutes and even a
movie like Hitchcock's Rope (1948), which avoids any
visible cuts, secretly speeds up the syuzhet. Games, by contrast,
depend on simultaneity of the dynamic content and its
representation. The most successful examples, for example Doom or Quake,
meanwhile lack any kind of plot. To have no story but plenty of
high-end graphics with constantly new effects has become a mark of
quality.

3Jesper Juul describes computer games as a
two-layer composition of material and program in which the latter
gives a meaningful structure to the game's objects (texts,
graphics, sounds, and so forth). This model corresponds to Lev
Manovich's description of the database as "a new way to structure our experience of
ourselves and our world," and therefore as the
contemporary counterpart to the traditional form of
narration.[5] The database became an expression of
the variability of new media: entries can be modified, added and
deleted without consequences for the entity of the database; the
user is granted random access to different kinds of multimedia
objects. In the simplest case this may be by engaging in the
linearity of a movie by jumping to different positions. The rise of
the database changes the relation between paradigm and syntagm as
described by de Saussure and Barthes. Traditionally, the paradigm
becomes visible as an ordered collection of signs only through the
syntagm as a meaningful arrangement of selected signs. When
narration is superseded by the database, the paradigm becomes real
and the syntagm virtual.[6] In comparison to narration with its
one dimensional-structure of time, database information is
structured in multiple dimensions. Time is usually too abstract and
dysfunctional as an interface to databases, while a spatial
construction (be it a house, a landscape or something abstract)
seems more appropriate. We can say that the form of narration is
temporal and authoritarian because the author has organized the
information in advance. The form or interface of the database is
spatial and interactive or semi-authoritarian.

One of the first applications permitting navigation through
multimedia data was the Aspen Moviemap made in 1978 by Andrew Lippman
and his team at MIT. The streets of Aspen, Colorado were filmed
from a moving car and the footage was stored on laser-discs. This
interactive movie map could be watched on a touchscreen display
allowing users to choose their own routes at each
junction.[7] The relatively new MPEG-4
specification now offers authors a standardized language for
organizing interactive data. The user can interact on the basis not
only of shots or scenes as the smallest dynamic unit, but also of
objects within the picture. Additionally all data can be accessed
in a three-dimensional setup. But the crucial opposition between
database and narration endures. New technological standards like
MPEG-4 will probably bring new hybrid formats. Soap operas and TV
shopping can be merged so that users can obtain additional
information about characters and order products featured in a show.
It is more interesting, however, to see how cinematic narration
responds to the database challenge. Manovich refers to Vertov's
Man with a Movie
Camera as the first database film, and also to Peter
Greenaway, whose "favorite system is numbers. The sequence of
numbers acts as a narrative shell that 'convinces' the
viewer that she is watching a narrative. In reality, the scenes
that follow one another are not connected in any logical
way."[8] Consequently Greenaway has moved away
from temporal cinema in recent years and now concentrates on
spatial installations and new-media projects. Alongside
Manovich's database filmmakers, we can find a lot of influences
in contemporary films. The end of narration as dominant cultural
form posited by Manovich seems to be demonstrated in very diverse
forms such as the para-narrations of David Lynch, blockbusters like
Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994) or
Christopher Nolan's amnesia thriller Memento (1999). The fact that in
Pulp Fiction the linear form of narration is already
partially suspended has nothing to do with random order: even this
post-linear narration is precisely constructed under full control
of the author. Whether the viewer would prefer to change the story
remains an open question.

4
An attempt to spatialize narration can be found in synchronized
multi-stream dramas that offer the viewer two or more corresponding
linear programs to jump between. On 1 January 2000, seven Danish TV
stations co-broadcasted the D-Dag project set
up by the "Dogme 95" initiators Thomas Vinterberg, Lars
von Trier, Soren Kragh-Jacobsen and Kristian Levring. On the
preceding eve of the new millennium, the four directors shot four
connected real-time films that were then shown synchronously on
four different channels. The fifth channel showed the first four
films in split-screen format, while the sixth and seventh
broadcasted the behind-the-scenes communication among directors and
actors. The passive viewer became user and with the familiar remote
control could edit his own film.[9]

D-Dag is only one of several similar projects. In 1991
two German TV stations produced Mörderische Entscheidung
(Murderous Decision) by Oliver Hirschbiegel, a cross-genre
story somewhere between film noir and detective movie. The film was
shot in two versions: one was from the perspective of a woman, the
other followed a male figure. Both films began identically, then
separated, sometimes met in double version of scenes with both
characters, and at the end became identical again. What is
interesting about Mörderische Entscheidung is that it
demonstrates in almost didactical fashion all possible relations
between the two narrations. Hirschbiegel uses the narrative voids
we know from film noir as a general style to give the viewer the
feeling that a lack of certain information is not caused by zapping
incorrectly. To make sure that main story remains understandable
important information was given on both channels at the same time.
Hirschbiegel also tried to direct audience attention towards one
channel - if not to say make people zap due to boredom - by
reducing the amount of information given on the other channel. In
an empirical study of Mörderische Entscheidung, Kay Kirchman
revealed that the more similar the two versions were, the greater
was the viewer satisfaction.[10] In particular, most viewers
misunderstood a more experimental party scene that was shown
realistically from the woman's perspective in one version and
in the other through the eyes of the narcotized male protagonist.
The experiment worked best when both versions showed the same
information from different points of view - be it a classical
shot/reverse-shot-relationhip or a scene that was broadcasted and
filmed from the monitor. The Aristotelian unity of space and time
had to remain untouched, and along with it the narration. By
contrast, the similarly structured DVD The Last Cowboy
(Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker, 1998) from the outset avoids
straight narration in favor of three parallel video-essays about
the myths of America. The film contrasts memory, imagination and
reality among which the viewer can zap without losing the
trail.

5
The question therefore remains: What can be done to overcome linear
narration and deconstruct the author's authority without
forcing the user to assume the responsibility and not always
pleasant duty of co-authorship? Mike Figgis brought parallel
narration in split-screen format to the cinemas with Timecode (1999).
Viewers were not required to choose among the four pictures, but
instead were guided by the director's sound design. In an
interview, Figgis took what can only be regarded as a step
backward: "We also hope the DVD release people will get the
four unedited soundtracks, and the music as a separate element, so
they will be able to do their own mix. If we get enough space on
the DVD, they will be able to (view) each film separately, to build
the narrative their own way."[12] Somewhat more
interesting is the fact that Figgis held screenings in which he
performed live sound mixes, and in doing so reactivated the
projectionist - a figure that nearly fell victim to automation and
digital satellite distribution. Before the rise of VJ culture,
projectionists tended to be regarded as a source of mistakes and
irritation, but might now play a key role in turning linear cinema
narration into post-linear performance. [13]

The Taiwanese director Ko Yi-cheng made his film Lan yue/Blue Moon
(1997) specially for remixing: "I divided the story into five
episodes and devoted each twenty-minute episode to one set of
things happening to this trio. In two thousand feet, I had to
finish every episode. The reels can be screened in any sequence, so
you'll have five different endings: either the trio walk down
the road holding hands, or they separate, or the woman rejects both
men, or she falls for one of the two men. 120 versions, 120
possibilities." [14] This approach recalls the early
days of cinema when theater owners bought single scenes from the
producers and combined these scenes to create a program. In line
with this standard practice, Edwin S. Porter left it up to the
projectionists to decide whether his famous take with the cowboy
shooting at the camera be shown at the beginning or the end of
The Great Train
Robbery (1903).

Two points about the Taiwanese director's approach are
interesting: First, Ko Yi-cheng pursues the humanist concept of a
flexible work for viewers who nevertheless remain passive. Second,
he transfers interactivity to the level of representation. While
the traditional notion of interactivity aims at altering the fabula
itself, Ko Yi-cheng works with already established syuzhet schemata
like flashback or ellipsis. Obviously, the story ultimately changes
according to the sequence of the single episodes, but this change
comes about only through the viewers' individual interpretation
of what they see. As a pre-cinematic occurrence, the fabula remains
undefined.

[13] I once saw Presumed Innocent starring Harrison Ford, a
judicial drama that already features a couple of flashbacks, and
the projectionist had mixed up the reels. His mistake turned out to
be rather good for the movie.